MatchPoint

The Search for the Relevant PR Pitch

I found it ironic that the author of Groundswell, a book/movement/phenomenon that describes how ideas germinate from the ground up — without top-down influence — devoted space in his blog to the PR practice of pitching stories to influencers (e.g., “anyone with an audience”) from the top down. The book posits: “When consumers you’ve never […]

The Search for the Relevant PR Pitch Read More »

The Bad Pitch Wiki

As the long-time, but recently retired editor of the Gawker-owned A-list blog Lifehacker, Gina Trapani has moved effortlessly in tech and social media’s rarefied circles. In her editorial gatekeeper role, she also received more than a fair share of inane or misguided story pitches from lazy or vendor-reliant PR people. Now that she’s out of

The Bad Pitch Wiki Read More »

Micro-engaging

It was inevitable. Some enterprising person figured out — sort of — how to monetize (exploit) PR peeps’ burning desire to engage journalists via Twitter. Not only that, the means of engagement is a press release — reduced to a single line. The cost: $1 per character with a $50 minimum. Yikes! Here’s the tweeted

Micro-engaging Read More »

Maximize Your Gobbledygook

My friend and occasional collaborator Mark Fortier pinged me about his client David Meerman Scott‘s newest initiative Gobbledygook Grader from HubSpot. It’s an online tool that hopes to solve the other issue around which Holtz and Scoble locked horns this week: poorly written pitches (as if misguided pitches were not bad enough). In his post,

Maximize Your Gobbledygook Read More »

The End of PR Spam?

I’ve been in the PR game for a while, and as long as I can remember, clients have judged and compensated PR pros based on their ability to build a positive presence in the media. This client-agency paradigm hasn’t changed much over the years, though the means for building that presence, and the nature of

The End of PR Spam? Read More »